THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1997:
July
July 1997
- July: Chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee, James Rowley, resigns after committee chairman Dan Burton refuses to fire "chief investigator" David Bossie. Rowley accuses Bossie, the president of Citizens United, of "unrelenting" self-promotion in the press to the detriment of the committee's probe into Whitewater. Rowley says Bossie makes it impossible for him "to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney's Office." (Salon)
- July 4: Bill Clinton meets with Monica Lewinsky after Lewinsky has sent him a three-page letter complaining of his failure to bring her back into the White House, and threatening to reveal their affair if he refuses. The meeting is stormy and emotional. At the end, after the tears and the bickering have died down, Lewinsky mentions that a friend at the Pentagon (Linda Tripp, though she does not identify Tripp by name) is being hounded by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, asking questions about an encounter between Clinton and Kathleen Willey. Clinton tells Lewinsky of Willey's phone call to the White House about Isikoff. Lewinsky immediately suspects that Willey is trying to play both sides against each other for her own benefit. Her warning about Willey is brushed off, Clinton saying rudely that Willey is "too flat-chested" to interest him and seemingly unworried about anything Willey might say. Lewinsky goes home and discusses her meeting with Linda Tripp. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- July 4: Conservative Internet gadfly Matt Drudge, purveyor of the gossip and scandal sheet "The Drudge Report," publishes a "Drudge Exclusive" on his Web site saying that Michael Isikoff is trying to print a story that will pin damning sexual harassment charges on Bill Clinton, but Isikoff has yet to publish it. The story is bolstered on July 29, when Drudge, given a tip by Jones lawyer George Conway, publishes a much more detailed and salacious story about Isikoff's impending piece. Drudge, who is portrayed as little more than a scandal-monger by Marvin Kalb (see the July 29 entry), cares little for journalistic ethics or whether or not his stories are actually true -- he has already won some notoriety for a wild story about a bald eagle tattoo on Clinton's nether regions. Mistakes and outright lies compete with real stories (from other sources) on the pages of his site. Not particularly political, he prefers the Republicans because they have the juicy scandal stories; he also has a personal hatred for Bill Clinton. Isikoff is left wondering how Drudge got word of a story he had yet to publish. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- July 10: 24 House Republicans, led by Dick Armey, meet secretly in congressman Lindsey Graham's office to plan on the ouster of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. They feel that the public notoriety of Gingrich, already tarred with a number of sexual and financial scandals, is dragging the party down. A simple majority of House members voting to replace Gingrich is all that is needed, and with angry Democrats joining the dissident Republicans, it seems the votes are there. However, a last-minute disagreement on whether Armey or Bill Paxon will replace Gingrich disrupts their efforts; Armey informs Gingrich that his position is in jeopardy, and Gingrich joins with the House leadership to shore up his rule. Paxon decides to retire from the House, and Gingrich's place as Speaker is secure for the moment. After the 1998 Republican election debacle, in which Gingrich predicts the Republicans will gain up to 30 seats and instead loses five, Gingrich resigns both as Speaker and as a congressman. (Wikipedia, Hilton and Testa)
- July 14: Clinton and Lewinsky meet again in the office of White House aide Nancy Hernreich, who weeks before had received a warning call from Kathleen Willey regarding the upcoming Isikoff article. Clinton wants to know if Lewinsky's friend at the Pentagon, the one who knows about Willey and Isikoff, is Linda Tripp. Lewinsky confirms this. Clinton asks ingenuously, "Do you trust this woman?" Lewinsky, unaware of Tripp's secret agenda, is effusive in Tripp's defense, calling her a staunch Clinton supporter (Tripp keeps up the charade by, among other means, hanging large photos of Clinton in her Pentagon office). Lewinsky lies to Clinton, telling him that she had not told Tripp of their affair, and saying that she learned of the Willey accusation from Clinton's secretary Betty Currie. Trusting Lewinsky far more than he should, Clinton accepts her story and asks her to convince Tripp to talk to White House lawyer Bruce Lindsey about the Willey situation. Tripp will eventually call Lindsey, but deny informing Isikoff about anything to do with Willey. Tripp makes an appointment to meet with Clinton's primary lawyer, Robert Bennett, but refuses to show up for the meeting. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- July 15: Kenneth Starr completes his investigation of Vince Foster's death; he rules it a suicide, just as the Park Police, the FBI, and the Fiske report have previously determined. The announcement receives almost no publicity. (CNN, Washington Post)
- July 25: Paula Jones's official lawyers, Cammarata and Davis, subpoena Kathleen Willey to testify about her supposed sexual encounter with Bill Clinton in the Jones lawsuit. The idea is not necessarily to have Willey actually testify, but to force a more lucrative and embarrassing deal from Clinton. Instead, Clinton's lawyer, Robert Bennett, warns that if Willey is brought into the proceedings, he will break off all negotiations over a settlement. Willey's lawyer, Daniel Gecker, has been talking with both the Jones and Clinton legal teams, telling the Jones lawyers that he would rather his client merely submit an affidavit instead of be subpoenaed, and asking Bennett for his promise that the White House wouldn't attack his client if she refuses to testify. Gecker continues to insist that Willey is a "reluctant witness," and files a motion to quash the subpoenas, claiming that she has no information relevant to Jones's complaint. Negotiations for a settlement continue.
- Cammarata and Davis do not realize how badly they are harming their case by confiding all the details of the negotiations to their behind-the-scenes legal advisors, George Conway, Jerome Marcus, and Richard Porter, and the hardline conservatives they represent. Cammarata and Davis, though committed Republicans, refuse to conceive of using a civil lawsuit to further a partisan agenda. They assume, wrongly, that their secretive cohorts have the same commitment to ethical, legal jurisprudence. The "elves," as cohort Ann Coulter once dubbed them, have no intention of letting this lawsuit disappear via a negotiation. The idea is to use the lawsuit to create the maximum embarrassment for Clinton, hopefully even resulting in impeachment -- they could care less if Jones wins or loses, or if she garners a dime in damages. All of the elves are highly partisan, absolutely committed right-wing operatives (Conway, probably the most imposing legal figure of the group, once attempted to date right-wing talk show darling Laura Ingraham, and it is Ingraham who brought the Arkansas Project lawyers and Matt Drudge together; she and Conway will both lie about receiving confidential information from Cammarata and Davis), and a settlement is the last thing on their minds. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- July 27: The painfully thin Ann Coulter tells Politically Incorrect's Bill Maher, "Anorexics never have boyfriends. ...That's one way to know you don't have anorexia, if you have a boyfriend." On the same show, she displays her concern for the execution of wrongly convicted persons by saying, "If they have the one innocent person who has ever to be put to death this century out of over 7,000, you probably will get a good movie deal out of it." (Huffington Post)
- July 29: Frustrated by reporter Michael Isikoff's inability to break the juicy, if undersourced, tale of Clinton's sexual misconduct, George Conway, one of Paula Jones's under-the-table legal advisors, leaks the essence of the Kathleen Willey allegations of unwanted sexual advances from the president to conservative Internet publisher Matt Drudge. Drudge is called by Marvin Kalb "the dot.com epitome of the 'new news,' who would later play a major role in the Lewinsky coverage. Drudge placed no journalistic restrictions on the material he published on his Internet Web page. If the story was juicy, sexy, and eye-catching, he would run it." Kalb is too kind to mention that Drudge has already proven himself a reliable outlet for the most mendacious and unsubstantiated charges against Clinton, and has been used before by Republicans and conservatives to publish wild rumors. None of Drudge's previous "bombshells" have actually caught major media notice; this one does. Drudge, who names Willey and cites an unnamed White House source (Linda Tripp), runs the story with an additional angle: how the established media is suppressing the real news for the benefit of those in office, accusing Isikoff of complicity with the Clinton lawyers in holding back his story. Drudge either doesn't know or doesn't care that this story, originating with Linda Tripp and circulating back and forth between the Paula Jones legal team, Isikoff, and a variety of anti-Clinton figures led by literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, is badly undersourced; "respectable" media outlets like Isikoff's Newsweek are constrained by journalistic ethics to substantiate the story before printing it. Yet, stung by Drudge's carefully orchestrated revelation, Newsweek will print Isikoff's much more detailed story two weeks later.
- The story's initial impact, though strong, is nothing to what it will lead to in the next few months. Robert Bennett, Clinton's primary lawyer in the Jones case, is infuriated by the article, suspecting correctly that the Jones legal team is the source, though he knows nothing as yet of the covert legal and financial support Jones is receiving. As for Tripp, she wonders if Isikoff himself hasn't leaked the story to Drudge; Isikoff is enraged by the suggestion. Isikoff later fingers lawyer Ann Coulter, one of the lesser lights of the covert Jones legal advisory team she has dubbed "the elves," as the source of the story. Coulter may or may not have contacted Drudge over the story; she later admits to having purveyed the salacious lie about the "distinguishing characteristic" of Clinton's sexual organs to the right-wing press. "We were terrified that settle," Coulter later tells Isikoff. "It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the president." Cammarata and Davis later deny ever hearing of Coulter, and say that Conway, Marcus, and Porter would have had no legal right to confide any information to her.
- Willey's lawyer, Daniel Gecker, says that the Drudge article blows any chance that Willey will go on the record for Isikoff, and calls the article "a horrible injustice" to his client's privacy. (Marvin Kalb, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- July 31: Reporter Michael Isikoff, whose exclusive on Kathleen Willey was blown by Internet gadfly Matt Drudge as part of the Jones "elves'" strategy to ensure that there is no settlement in the Paula Jones case, is further rocked when Julie Hiatt Steele, a friend of Willey's who once confirmed Willey's story of being sexually molested by Bill Clinton, informs Isikoff that Willey had asked her to lie about the entire story. Steele admits to doing so as a favor to Willey, but now retracts her statement and says she knew nothing of the story until Willey called in hysterics to beg her to confirm her story to Isikoff minutes before Isikoff arrived at Steele's home to interview her. She apologized for lying to him, and says she doesn't want him to have "egg on his face" for publishing her friend's phony story. Steele, in her 1999 lawsuit against Isikoff and Newsweek, says that Isikoff phones her again that afternoon, telling her that he's going with her original story. Steele is stunned: not only has she retracted her statement, but the entire previous interview was agreed to be off the record. "[T]here's so much pressure to get this out," Isikoff explains, "I have to do it." When he learns of Tripp's statement to Isikoff, Clinton lawyer Robert Bennett growls that the entire Willey story is false and that Tripp "is not to be believed," frightening Tripp into believing that she may lose her job at the Pentagon. In turn, Tripp frightens Monica Lewinsky, who now believes that Tripp may make good on her threat to write a tell-all book about both Willey and Lewinsky.
- The next day, Isikoff meets with Linda Tripp to confirm the story. Tripp reiterates her version of Willey's story: that Willey had had a sexual encounter in the White House with Clinton, but far from it being sexual harassment, Willey had planned the entire encounter and was overjoyed that it finally took place. On August 11, Isikoff will publish a story in Newsweek entitled "A Twist in Jones v. Clinton," telling Willey's story and saying that Julie Hiatt Steele verified the story to him. (In Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton, he tells the story somewhat differently from his Newsweek version, omitting the Newsweek story's detail that Steele had heard the tale from Willey weeks after it supposedly took place.) Isikoff omits entirely Tripp's contention that Willey orchestrated the entire encounter. He says repeatedly that he believes Willey, in part because of an anonymous phone call he received from a woman who says she, too, was groped by Clinton. Tripp responds with a letter to the editor, revised by both Lewinsky and Isikoff, claiming that Isikoff showed up at her office uninvited, that Isikoff "compelled" her to tell him about Willey, and reiterating her claim that Willey planned the sexual encounter with Clinton. Newsweek refuses to print the letter. Isikoff may have been better off not having the letter published; it confirms that the supposedly independent, nonpartisan reporter had, in fact, been guiding Isikoff all along. It also shores up Willey's already-fragile credibility, and allows Willey and her lawyer to continue playing the Clinton and Jones lawyers off one another. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
